Monday, November 3, 2008

Only eight percent of the Science Museum is on show. Ninety two percent resides in six aircraft hangars just south of Swindon.

It is guarded by Gurkhas, peopled by ghosts in flying jackets and filled with vintage planes, strange machines and a teamaker the size of a wardrobe. Lucy Davies visits the greatest museum you'll never see.

'There's a reason for the red tags,' scolds the curator as our photographer circles in for a close-up of an autopsy table. This one, she warns, belonged to Sir William Jenner, physician to Queen Victoria, whose reputation rests on drawing the distinction between typhus and typhoid. 'It's covered in spores and deposits. We don't know how infectious they still are.'(read more)